Victims' families face a life of grief, waiting and praying

Barbara Serrano's life is on hold while she waits for an arrest of her son's murderer.

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Barbara Serrano, 58, right, says her grandson Max Calvillo, 5, left, looks just like her late son Peter Serrano, 21, who was shot to death on the front porch of their Fillmore home in 2003. While friends of the young man have created a memorial to him at the entrance, Serrano has a shrine erected in his honor in their living room around a large statue of Jesus. “Nobody had the right to deny him his ambitions and his dreams,” Serrano says of her son. The killer remains at large.

Karen Quincy Loberg / Star staff

Sandy Montes-Cerna places a yellow rose where as her nephew, Carlos Prado, was gunned down four years ago. Prado was 19 years old and was going home from his girlfriend´s house. He was shot once in the head at about 10:30 p.m.

Juan Carlo / Star staff

Sergeant Billy Hester, left, talks with his partner, detective Dave Brantley, both with the Ventura County Sheriff´s Department homicide unit, at the scene of a fatal stabbing that occurred in 2008.

Chuck Kirman / Star staff

Kristin Rogahn, forensic scientist with the Ventura County Sheriff´s Department, talks with Sergeant Billy Hester, center, and detective Dave Brantley at the scene of a fatal stabbing that occurred in 2008.

Chuck Kirman / Star staff

Peter Serrano, 21, was shot to death on the front porch of his family´s Fillmore home in 2003. The killer remains at large.

Karen Quincy Loberg / Star staff

On the good days, when Barbara Serrano can emerge from the well of grief and pull herself out of bed, she walks to the bathroom mirror and practices for the moment she prays will one day come.

She stares into her tired brown eyes and steadies herself on the tile floor, preparing for the day she can confront her son's murderer at a trial she now can only dream about because there has been no arrest.

In a measured voice she tells the mirror that her son, Peter, may have had some rough friends and a less-than-perfect background, but he didn't deserve to be gunned down on her front porch. She rehearses telling the court about Peter's dreams and the future he'll never have. And, if she has made it through her entire speech without shedding a tear — because this man doesn't deserve to see them — she will talk of not one death, but two.

"You didn't just murder Peter," she says. "You basically murdered me because I no longer exist."

Peter's death is one of the more than 361 unsolved murders in Ventura County, some decades old, some with flowers wilting from the recent funeral.

Though the public may have forgotten many of them, for the family of the victims, and the police who are trying to hunt down a killer, forgetting is not an option.

It's been 6 1/2 years since Serrano saw her son's lifeless body taken from her Fillmore home after what she and officials think was a gang-related shooting.

She knows nothing will ever bring her only son back, and time doesn't heal all wounds, but she thinks if her son's killer were caught, it might dilute the pain.

"Once the case is solved, I will not stop mourning him — I've accepted that is my new life — but I will be able to concentrate more on the 21 years I did have him and not so much on what happened to him," she says over what is now the constant background sound of a squawking police scanner.

She listens around the clock, hoping to get some clue about the man she thinks killed her son. A bare light bulb and TV, always tuned to the reality crime shows, throw the only light over her dark living room. This is how she lives her life — waiting, hoping, listening.

Serrano prays for the day that Ventura County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Billy Hester calls, telling her the good news, they have made an arrest after the long investigation, she can move onto the next stage of her grief.

The hunters

So much of what Hester does is juggle all the murder cases his team of detectives has before them, running after leads that are hot and trying to dig up information on ones grown cold.

He's working Serrano's case; the Brock and Davina Husted case, as well as at least six others, including on this day, the murder of Andrew Singler.

He and his partner, Dave Brantley, look up and down a Moorpark driveway once, then again, trying to figure out where the killer stood.

Brantley stands in the exact spot where Singler was stabbed, then paces off the steps Singler took before he collapsed and died at the end of the driveway.

The two men were called to the scene that night two years ago and saw Singler's body crumpled against a truck. Now they want to re-create the scene in their heads, to try to piece together the dozens of witness statements and hundreds of pieces of evidence.

A rooster crows in the distance and a horse from a nearby stable looks on. It's a lot quieter at the Moorpark home now than it was that night when 100 people were celebrating graduation and a fight broke out.

By many accounts, Singler, the 18-year-old from Camarillo with an affinity for skateboarding, was just trying to break up a fight.

As with most of the homicides they work, there are hundreds of pages of statements and interviews and they have to pick through them to figure out which are true and can help them close the case.

They brought out Kristin Rogahn, a forensic scientist with the sheriff's crime lab, to help corroborate what some of the witnesses say happened.

The detectives speak in hushed tones, explaining the series of events, and Rogahn snaps photos of the ground as she looks at the type of driveway and its slope. After she leaves, she'll re-create the blood dripping to the ground in her lab, which will help determine where Singler was stabbed and if he was standing at the time. Her findings will help prove some of witness statements — hopefully. The driveway is packed dirt, which makes drawing conclusions a challenge.

This is how the detectives do their work, re-creating a scene in their head, going over their collected statements time and time again, talking to witnesses a fourth and fifth time, revisiting the scene and always hoping for a break that will lead them to a killer.

‘A huge weight'

The detectives love nothing more than "running hot" for days after a murder — chasing after leads before they grow cold, watching suspects for hours, connecting the dots from one statement to another, working 20- and 30-hour shifts with the occasional catnap to recharge their batteries and start the hunt anew.

The homicide beat is one of the most coveted in the department. The stakes are high and the cases can be challenging, and, hopefully, rewarding. Parents and loved ones call on the anniversary of their child's death or on their birthdays, hoping that justice will be served. The detectives save the phone messages of parents thanking them for giving a semblance of closure.

"It is a huge weight on your shoulders," Hester says.

Each of the 12 detectives and sergeants in the Sheriff's Department homicide unit carries a coin in his pocket, emblazoned with a pit bull and the words, "Major Crimes Investigations Where the Predator Becomes the Prey."

But for all the excitement of "running hot," there is just as much, if not more time spent in the office writing reports, looking up suspects on computer databases, going to court hearings, consulting with prosecutors and all the minutia required to make a case.

Their offices don't look that different from an insurance agent's, with long rows of drab gray cubicles with stacks of paper and coffee mugs and snapshots of family tacked to the walls. Along with photos of Hester's family at the beach is an old grainy one of his grandfather in his Thai police chief uniform. But a closer look at the binders and some of the photos on the wall, and you know this isn't just any office.

There are six mug shots of Joshua Packer snapped after his various arrests, including the one of him blown up for a press conference announcing him as a suspect in the murder of the Husteds last year in their Faria Beach home. Beside it is an elaborate diagram of gang members, all suspected of being tied to a series of shootings. Lines are drawn from guns and get-away cars to various shaved head hoodlums with childlike nicknames that belie the reason they are on the wall.

Not far from all the mug shots, there is a photo of an innocent-looking young brother and a sister — she a smiling towhead, he with ruddy cheeks. It's from the memorial service for Jason and Jennifer Mulvaney, whose father brutally stabbed them before killing himself last year in Thousand Oaks.

"We wish we had the chance to hunt him," Brantley, a father of four, says with contempt.

Beside the Mulvaneys' photo is a program from the Husteds' funeral, with a photo of the beaming couple looking over the unit.

"It's a reminder," Hester says. "This makes it personal."

For some family members, an arrest makes a huge difference in their lives

That was the case for Sam Reeves, whose 15-year-old son Sammy was gunned down in 2003, an innocent victim caught in the middle of a fight at a party. Brantley sunk his teeth into the case and didn't let go until an arrest was made in 2009. The arrest changed the way Sam Reeves grieves his son.

"Now it's not all darkness," Reeves, of Santa Paula, said of the long days of sadness. "You can see some light and that light is justice."

‘I'm here again'

The streets of Oxnard are dark and quiet as Sandy Montes-Cerna points her old Nissan toward the scene of a murder.

She drives down J Street several times a month, where she knows her 19-year-old nephew Carlos Prado walked the night he was headed home from his girlfriend's. Then she makes a left on Bryce Canyon Avenue, which she doesn't understand because he had no reason to go down that street, or the next, Jackson, where it all ended.

"Carlos was down here, this way," she says, driving the route she has gone down a hundred times before searching for some semblance of a clue. "He never made it back."

The light of the dashboard illuminates her face, which has prematurely aged beyond its 37 years. Carlos was shot and killed four years ago in what is thought to be a gang-related homicide. Though she knows he was no angel and had some friends in gangs, she doesn't think he was in a gang or provoked anyone. Regardless of the circumstances, no one had the right to kill him, she says.

Montes-Cerna helped raise Prado; having few answers to his death makes the grief all that much harder. If there was an arrest, she believes it would allow her to move on from the horror of his death to celebrating his life.

So she visits the sidewalk where police found his body with a gunshot to his head. She's amazed that nobody saw anything and holds some hope that if she goes there, just maybe she'll find something. She doesn't know if police have any leads or if the killer simply vanished in the night. Police usually don't tell the families how the case is going, for fear of exposing leads they may be chasing.

In the absence of news, many parents of victims take to sleuthing themselves. There is Barbara Serrano with her police scanner, or Sam Reeves who constantly called Brantley with tips of where he thought his son's killers were, or Montes-Cerna with her visits to the site where her nephew died.

"I think I just want him to know that I'm not giving up, that I'm still here," Montes-Cerna says.

She pulls her car to the curb and walks slowly to the site where his body was found.

"Hey baby, I'm here again," she says, gazing at the barren concrete, washed clean of Prado's blood years ago. "Four years, papito, four years have passed and nothing has changed. I promise you, you will have justice, mi amor. "

She lays a yellow rose down, says the Lord's Prayer and drives off, waiting for the day she fears may never come.